Helena Rubinstein used guile, brilliant branding, and more than a few falsehoods to lift cosmetics from an accessory for prostitutes to a desired luxury item. Geoffrey Jones reveals her history.
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The competitive landscape of executive education is feeling a tectonic shift even as demand grows for managerial skills. This study maps and analyzes the major providers of executive education programs, including business schools, consultancies, and corporate universities, to better understand and explain the industry’s present and future dynamics.

Sales reps feed on two forms of compensation: salary, and a bonus tied to achieving a periodic quota. Would a more frequent quota incentivize better numbers? Doug Chung and Das Narayandas offer some answers.
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This study of different sales quotas and their effect on sales performance at a major retail chain in Sweden finds that changing from a monthly to a daily quota plan increases performance mainly for low-performing salespeople.

The informational and computational “tectonic shifts” of the past decade—enabling sharing, transacting, collaborating, and learning online—have created new challenges for executive development programs, in part by making visible to both buyers and sellers the specific objectives of participants and their organizations. Drawing on interviews with sponsoring organizations and participants in executive education at Harvard Business School, this study examines what learners and organizations want from executive development and maps the sources of value and drivers of demand for executive development.

An increasingly obvious and costly gap has emerged between the skills that executives need in order to cope with the volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, and complex business landscape and the skills being imparted by executive development programs. Providers of these programs need to focus on cultivating skills least susceptible to digital distributed delivery in ways that will make them most relevant to the greatest number of contexts. In addition, skills that are difficult to articulate and translate into formulas will benefit from focused, heavily social learning environments supported by constant reinforcement from savvy facilitators and motivated peers.

Ron Johnson’s career path has featured stops at some of the world’s largest and most innovative retailers, including Target, Apple, and J.C. Penney. At each stop, Johnson learned invaluable lessons like how to build on success, how to keep growing as an individual, and how to embrace missteps. Professor Das Narayandas examines Johnson’s career trajectory and discusses the importance of personal accountability and creative planning in the rapidly-changing world of retail.
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Bonus programs are effective for motivating sales people, but also costly for companies to maintain. Doug Chung and Das Narayandas study several compensation schemes to see which work best.
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Sales force compensation is a key instrument available to firms for motivating and enhancing sales performance. What are the most effective forms of compensation? In a field experiment involving four regional sales forces of a prominent firm in India, the authors examined the impact of conditional and unconditional bonus schemes. Findings from this study provide guidance to firms on how to use conditional and unconditional compensation to enhance sales rep productivity and better manage the achievement of sales forecasts.
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Organizations succeed by identifying, developing, and retaining talented leaders. Professors W. Earl Sasser and Das Narayandas, who teach leadership development in one of Harvard Business School's Executive Education programs, discuss the fine points of leadership development. Key concepts include: Talent provides organizations a key competitive advantage, but there must be managers and a process in place to identify and nurture next-generation leaders. Large and small companies may have a leg up in leadership development. Medium-sized organizations have the most difficulty with talent identification because these companies often lack the infrastructure and human resources capabilities. What separates true leaders from the merely capable is flexibility in leadership styles in order to meet challenges of the global economy, rapid commoditization, and hyper-competitive environments.
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Harvard Business School is famous for its case method of classroom teaching. Here is a look at some of the classic cases that have been taught to business leaders worldwide—and are still in use today.
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Executives talk a good game about managing customer relationships. But then why do many companies persist in money-losing arrangements? Time to become proactive, says Harvard Business School professor Narakesari Narayandas.
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